---
id: people/cesar-hidalgo
about:
  label: César Hidalgo
  depiction: people/cesar-hidalgo.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Ihelpedit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.'
  description: >-
    Chilean physicist who founded the study of economic complexity and built
    public data sites such as the Observatory of Economic Complexity and Data
    USA.
  tags:
    - economic complexity
    - data visualisation
    - collective learning
person:
  affiliation: Toulouse School of Economics
  role: physicist and economist
  homepage: 'https://cesarhidalgo.com/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'Biography, César A. Hidalgo (his own site)'
      url: 'https://cesarhidalgo.com/biography'
    - title: César Hidalgo (Wikipedia)
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Hidalgo'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
César A. Hidalgo, born in Santiago de Chile on 22 December 1979, is a Chilean-Spanish-American physicist.[^1,2] He is a tenured professor at the Toulouse School of Economics and heads the Center for Collective Learning, with offices at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse and at Corvinus University of Budapest.[^1] He took a PhD in physics at Notre Dame under Albert-László Barabási, was a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School, and led MIT's Collective Learning group from 2010 to 2019.[^1,2] He also founded Datawheel, which builds sites for distributing public data.[^1,2]

He is known for founding the study of economic complexity.[^2] He and colleagues introduced the Economic Complexity Index in 2009 to estimate what an economy is capable of producing without having to list those capabilities.[^2] Studies have found that it predicts future growth, between countries and for regions within a country.[^2] With colleagues he built public sites for exploring such data, starting with the Observatory of Economic Complexity in 2011; Data USA followed in 2016.[^2] His group also built Place Pulse and Streetscore, which map how people perceive city streets.[^2] At TED in 2018 he proposed augmented democracy, in which citizens could be represented in some decisions by personalised AI agents, digital twins of themselves.[^2] His books are The Atlas of Economic Complexity, Why Information Grows, How Humans Judge Machines and The Infinite Alphabet.[^1,2]

On the wiki, the [Observatory of Economic Complexity](/data-sources/observatory-of-economic-complexity/) began as a master's thesis he supervised at MIT.